Karim Nayernia

Karim Nayernia (Persian: کریم نیرنیا‎) is an Iranian biomedical scientist and a world expert on stem cell biology.

He carried out pioneering work that has the potential to lead to future therapies for a range of medical conditions such as heart disease, Parkinson's disease and male infertility[citation needed]. His team was the first in the world to isolate a new type of stem cell from adult mouse testes (male sex glands), called spermatagonial stem cells. It was able to show that some of these stem cells, called multipotent adult germline stem cells (maGSCs), turned into heart, muscle, brain and other cells[citation needed]. Prof Nayernia and his team proposed that similar cells could be extracted from men using a simple testicular biopsy. On the basis of these cells, new stem cell techniques could be developed in order to treat a variety of illnesses.

In 2010, he discovered a new marker for detection of breast cancer stem cells. This findings define this novel marker and its effector signaling pathways as key factors in the proliferation and survival of breast cancer stem cells.